Most oral drugs are taken by the patients in the form of pills with different shapes and sizes. The pills are produced into preparations in disc or anomalous shape by special forming process after uniform mixing of drugs and adjuvant materials, which are widely applied in the modern pharmaceutical industry, for having the advantages of accurate dosage, stable quality, convenient to carry and transport, and the like. In accordance with the requirements in various aspects such as treatment, the dosage of a single pill and the proportion of raw materials to adjuvant materials, different drugs have different requirements on the shape, the size or other characteristics of the pills. For instance, vitamin pills, calcium pills and the like are usually larger, which are inconvenient for ordinary people to take one or more once, particularly for those special patents, such as the aged, children, postoperative patients, dysphagia patients or coma patients, who have difficulty in directly taking the pills, and thereby limiting the use of oral drugs and even affecting the treatment of patients.
Therefore, a device capable of crushing appropriate pills into pieces or powder (i.e. pill crusher) is required, in order to assist the patients who need but cannot normally take standard preparations to take medicine for deserved treatment. The pill crusher should be safe, high efficient, low cost, quiet, labor-saving and easy to use and can avoid the cross-contamination of drugs. However, the traditional pill crushers, e.g., “pot for pounding drugs”, generally employ the means of simple shock and grinding or employ a single lever to realize the action of crushing pills, which have the defect of low efficiency, loud noise, labor-consuming, quantity loss or the cross-contamination of pills and the like in the crushing process, and hence cannot fully meet the requirements of crushing the pills safely and efficiently. In particular, when pill crushers are used by medical personnel at medical institutions, their characteristics such as the crushing speed, efficiency, quietness, exogenous contamination/cross-contamination avoidance, labor-saving level and the like are especially important.
For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 7,413,137, with the inventor of James A. Donovan, filed on Sep. 21, 2006, provides a device, in which the bent-lever principle is utilized to convert the rotation of a handle into the parallel movement of a platen and further drive the platen to press towards a fixed plate to crush the pills between them and realize the objective of pill crushing, while the platen and the fixed plate are set on a same base. However, as the structure of this device is too complex, it has a lot of friction and relatively loud noise during its using process and make the crushing process inconvenient and high costly, this device cannot fully meet the users' needs. Moreover, for instance, the U.S. Pat. No. 3,915,393, with the inventor of Bill Webb Elkins, filed on Apr. 24, 1974, provides a device which simply utilizes the single-lever principle to convert the rotation of a handle into the downward pressing action so as to crush pills. But this single-lever structure, which cannot effectively provide the magnification factor of force, is labor-consuming, and particularly it is inconvenient to repeatedly crush lots of pills for a plurality of times when used in medical institutions. Furthermore, for instance, the U.S. Pat. No. Des. 337,828, with the inventor of David W. Gordon, filed on Dec. 12, 1990, provides a simple and portable pill crusher, which employs the principle of threaded rotation to convert rotation into linear motion to realize the action of crushing pills. Although this structure is labor-consuming, it is simple, convenient for crushing, and particularly applicable to crush a small amount of pills by family or individual. However, the structure cannot meet the requirement of medical institutions for crushing a large amount of pills.